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Google Glass in Worship?

Are church leaders ready for worship to engage the new frontier of Star Trek-like technology? If not, they may throw up a “red alert” when the first cutting edge worship leader proposes use of Google glasses for reading worship song lyrics. It could be much more than a spatial anomaly before we see worshipers no longer gazing up at mega screens for lyrics, but simply engaging their Google glass app dubbed “Glassware.

Massimo Ciociola, founder and CEO of the popular lyrics service MusiXmatch told me about the company’s plans to introduce a Google Glass app that will display song lyrics on Google’s heads-up display, which is still only available to a couple thousand people in the world.

In a live international interview with Ciociola (via Google Glass sans audio), according to Van Buskirk, MusiXmatch is already working on this app, which will reportedly do at least two things for those wearing the device:

If you’re listening to music on your Android via headphones, MusiXmatch for Google Glass will display lyrics in the heads-up display, so you can see them floating by as you walk around, or into things.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to enhancing worship and helping those who struggle to remember the lyrics of their favorite worship choruses. The music recognition feature should be able to identify any song the worship team is playing (if it is part of the Spotify library), or perhaps church members will all need to conform to Android with headsets, if we apply the Borg mantra that “resistance is futile.”

Looking out across a more innovative horizon, there’s a great opportunity for Christian media companies to develop their own Google Glassware that features worship lyrics with complementary media visuals. Of course, worship presentation and IMAG software apps may follow the path of cassettes and CDs into a black worm hole. But perhaps divinely-designed Google Glassware could help us “go where no worshiper has gone before.”

The music licensing and reporting aspects will be really interesting and potentially offer more accuracy; more than likely it will rely on existing music mapping and digital ID of content, plus the actual number of Google Glassware views in a pay period. If it is similar to Spotify's royalty rate calculations for streaming music, it all boils down to percentages and rates divided among writers, publishers for lyrics, as well as record labels for audio. I'm sure the major publishers are already developing a strategy to make sure they get their "fair share" of potential revenue.

What are your thoughts and ideas about using a Worship Google Glassware? Comment below.